Two days ago, I wrote an email about Flat Earthers, and how I get where they’re coming from. I got a reply to that from long-time reader, pro copywriter, and original Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann, who wrote:
===
Haha I love this! “For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers”. Should be the headline on your website.
===
In the words of farm boy Westley, “As you wish.”
After Liza’s email, I went into my WordPress settings, and changed the tagline of my site. Any visitor to any page of my site, aside from the optin page, will now see a masthead up top that reads, “Desert Kite: For much of my life, I’ve had sympathy for Flat Earthers.”
Stupid inside joke? Trivial? Trolling?
Perhaps. And yet…
Yesterday, I promised to share an interesting idea that’s been bouncing around my head after I heard it a few weeks ago.
The idea comes from Omid Malekan, who is now a professor of crypto (!) at Columbia University, and who was previously the resident crypto expert at Citibank.
Malekan was writing about memecoins, basically stupid inside joke cryptocurrencies, trivial and trolling shitcoins, which are now having their moment and are currently worth over $100 billion in aggregate.
Malekan thinks memecoins are a bubble bound to pop. But in trying to make that case, he decided to “steelman” the case for memecoins, and argue for the other side as well as he could. And he discovered something interesting:
===
I did realize some interesting things. Like historically, a lot of things start out as a joke and then end up becoming really significant and important. This is particularly true in the art world where a lot of what we today consider to be like, ‘Oh this is an amazing genius work of art,’ was just at the time 50 or 100 years ago the artist trolling.
===
Malekan gave the example of Don Quixote, which started out with Cervantes trolling the popular form of writing at the time, knightly romances.
In time though, Cervantes’s book took a life on its own. Today, it’s held up as the first novel, and it’s taught as canon and forced down the throats of university students worldwide.
The list gets much wider and more significant if you don’t look at just trolling but also include, play, fun, and aimless games.
I read once that agriculture didn’t arise by the gradual conquering and mastering of plants to produce food. Rather, it grew out of symbolic, playful, or temporary gardens that people grew for no practical purpose, the way Eastern Europeans still plant little pots of wheat before Easter.
What about language?
My personal theory, though I’m sure others have had it before, is that the wide variety of modern languages is there thanks to memeing, trolling teenagers throughout history. And if you want proof of that, look at how new creole languages still emerge today, with new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to the kids of the displaced parents.
But you probably don’t want proof of that. You probably want me to get to the point of this email, if any.
My point is simply that play, fun, aimless games, or even mockery, trolling, and memes, have value in business, beyond simply being a sweetener for your content.
Get ready for the pitch now, because I’m about to give it to you:
If you want an example of memery and trolling turning to gold, take what I call my Most Valuable Email trick. It started out as a joke. It was my own attempt to put a smile on my own face and later on the faces of my readers, once I had a few.
Then the Most Valuable Email trick became a habit.
Later, I discovered this Most Valuable Email trick was actually useful to me.
And today, it’s directly influenced not just my copy, but the design of my website and emails… my personal positioning… and even the business strategy of what I do with this little newsletter.
Plus I’ve shared the MVE trick with others, and this memey or jokey thing has had real concrete benefits for them too.
Here’s Shakoor Chowdhury, a marketer who does performance deals with ecommerce clients (he’s driving $300k+ in sales each month for just one of them). Shakoor wrote about MVE:
===
John, this is by far my favorite of your programs and really kickstarted my email marketing.
There were really two parts to MVE that changed my life:
1. Using “the meat” — emails cannot just be all information and value with no entertainment, you have to give people a reason WHY they should listen
2. the use of [the MVE trick] in your copy, what a powerful concept… instead of [doing what everybody else does, if you you use the MVE trick, it] also quickly raises your authority and credibility
When I bought this course I was very inconsistent, but you gave me direction and I started writing daily and grew a list of 470 subscribers in less than a month of implementing
===
If you would like to find out how to meme and troll your way to success: